Textbook Review 2: Convergences
The self-claim that it “develop[s] the critical tools necessary for understanding how a wide variety of verbal and visual texts are conceived, composed, targeted, interpreted, and evaluated” (2) is a modest, almost mis-statement of the critical and pedagogical questions with which Robert Atwan’s Convergences engages. In building the book’s methodology around the idea of a convergence (think, perhaps, of a confluence of rivers), the author creates a metaphorical punct for that moment of invention from which, in Joseph Harris’ “Revision as a Critical Practice,” the essay emerges. It is not then, as its self-claim might suggest, a book that simply guides readers through various interpretive practices. Instead, it is a book that, in its rigorous and almost taxonomic system of interrogation, navigates toward that Harris-ian moment of epiphany at which a unique stance on a given text appears (or at least can be pointed out) to the reader. In treating analysis as an act of laying questions over one another, Convergences locates, in a sense, a network of physical spaces/intersections in which a text’s meanings reside. More importantly, it treats meaning as existing in direct proportion to both the volume and intertextuality of the questions asked, such that the process of interrogation—as it exists in multiple, nearly countless, iterations—rather than a (pre)-fixed understanding of the text becomes the force that births and shapes the essay. The scope of the essay, here, is not determined from a point outside the work that it analyzes but instead arrived at after a series of interactions that take place from a point very much within the contours of the text.
In its framing each individual question as a method of analysis that attends to different aspects of the text, Convergences could be placed in the context of a critical theory primer. There is, for example, something of Aristotelian poetics in Chapter 2’s discussion of how the arrangement of component parts of a narrative lead the emotional response of the reader; There is something of new criticism’s close reading in the undivided attention that imagery and metaphor receive in Chapter 1’s proposition of a method for analyzing Ortiz Cofer’s poem “Lessons of the Past”; There is something, perhaps, of a new historicist’s attention to what is outside of the text in the book’s consistently directing the reader toward an examination of context as an analytical tool. An important distinction should be drawn here, however, that steers the book away from an oversimplified critical theory foundation: methods of analysis are not introduced for the purpose of discounting those that were introduced prior—there is no sense of privileging a single mode of thought/line of questioning as more correct, more enlightened. Instead, the book accumulates methods so to apply them simultaneously on/to whatever text the reader encounters. A better analog for understanding the book’s context, then, might be that of a Socratic dialogue. By responding to an answer with a subsequent question, meanings are built, complicated, critiqued, re-oriented and enhanced. To say, as I did earlier, that the book is engaged with a Harris-ian moment of epiphany is thus a bit misleading; the book, in a certain sense, actively discourages any process that does not locate an abundance of such epiphanies within a single text. That the reader can question each answer—each essay—that he/she arrives at destabilizes any behavior that treats the individual essay as a sufficient or comprehensive capturing of meaning. The reader is, without question, asked to pause and extract/record original thought that responds to the texts in the book; but in the same gesture, he/she is made aware that this is, in fact, a pause that inspires or prepares one for further entry, a pause that is part of a much larger process.
Before looking at a specific example from the book, it’s important to note how, in its very nature as a reader, Convergences actively engages cultural studies. In a basic way, the comprehensiveness of the texts that it chooses demands that the reader expand his/her ideas on, for example, southern gender-identity to include the vantage point of the range of persons operating within this sub-category. Portraiture thus becomes a shrewd place to begin the book, as it forces a reconciliation of the concerns of both portrait-taker and portrait-sitter. This environment of inclusion and the manner in which it extends or expands the resources an individual draws upon to assign meaning is likewise played out on a level of intertextuality. To use another example from the book, the ways in which we “make meaning” from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are not the exclusive result of our watching the movie. Meaning is influenced by the stillness of the movie poster, the poem that personalizes the movie within the context of a specific history of violence, its [the movie’s] bearing on violence in the present cultural moment—to name only three factors. Referring back to what I see as the central methodology of the book, an essay on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is productively complicated four times over by laying question over question so to find a common point—a convergence—at which the answers to these questions meet. What occurs here, in lay terms, is a “teasing out” or locating of potential meanings and potential essays by way of interrogation. And it is this term (locate) that one should keep in mind when looking more specifically at an offering of the book.
(*Note: Rather than exhaustively examine the many texts that the book offers, I will choose one, John Edgar Wideman’s “First Shot,” and diagnose the process by which the questions posed not only locate and extract meanings from this single text but likewise position it in relation to what has come before and what will come after it in the book—to show how the book is cumulative in its activity, using the questions asked of other forms to aid in understanding what is immediately in front of the reader. In isolating some of the questions that surround this particular essay, I will show how, in its attention to moments of intersection, the book locates and almost immediately complicates meanings so as to emulate a process by which the essay can occur and then begin to re-occur before the process of writing has even started.)
The pre-questions: Perhaps best employed in the fourth chapter of Convergences, before the book poses questions related to a given text, it first interrogates the form/genre (portrait, story, history, etc.) of which the text is a part. Here, in the introduction to a chapter devoted to “shaping spaces,” the reader is asked: How, as individuals and as groups, do we define ‘space’? How do the objects located within a space help to define its functionality and, subsequently, its meaning? Particularly in the way that this second question relates back to the idea of material history in Chapter 1’s approach to “All My Life for Sale,” these pre-questions creates an intersection point between space and personal identity in such a way to prepare the reader for how meaning might emerge in the texts that follow.
The marginalia-questions: (1) “What significance do you think the window at 7415 has for Wideman? What does it mean to him as a child? What has it come to represent from an adult’s perspective?” (252). By reading this essay in conjunction with those texts that precede it, the window becomes not a narrative detail but a metaphor as they were examined in the book’s first lesson. In this particular line of questioning, the reader’s attention is, then, drawn to the adult Wideman’s identification of the window as a gendered dividing line, creating two spaces in which behavior patterns emerge and social/gender identity is expressed or submitted to. In layering these questions upon the pre-questions to the chapter, the book creates a new intersection, one that problematizes the initial idea of space and self-defined identity to include the question of location within a space as an instance of imposed identity. (2) “Why do you think Wideman raises the issue of truth and fiction in this final paragraph? How do you think memoir is different from fiction based on personal experience? How much of this essay is composed of things Wideman admits he didn’t see or can’t exactly remember?” (254). The metaphor of the window, in these questions, is re-adjusted from being one of dividing line to being one of the photographer’s subjective camera lens. The reader is, in this moment, asked (perhaps subliminally urged) to remember the way in which Dorothy Allison’s essayistic self-portrait established meanings that were not conveyed in the photographer’s still-life. Here, the intersection of self-defined and imposed identity is expanded to include how Wideman was, in fact, outside the context in which this imposed identity was formed, how, then, the imposed identity might (or might not) be congruent with self-defined identity, how the social/gender identities of the present might unnecessarily revise readings of the past toward a negative connotation (a quesiton that very much carries over into the book’s reckoning with the historical Hollywood movie).
The post-questions: And, oh yes, there was a common thread of basketball. (1) “Why do you think he spends so much time describing the geography of his neighborhood? What do those details have to do with basketball?” (2) “Look closely at the photographs by Paul D’Amato, Brad Richman and Dana Lixemberg…Use the concept of framing to identify the focus of each photograph…Does basketball represent something different in each, or is the court essentially the same?” (255). And here, we have evidence of the taxonomy I spoke of earlier. Having established a general (one might say on a level of genus), multi-layered relationship between space and identity, the reader must now attend to the space’s species—the basketball court—and thus re-reconsider this relationship of space and identity as it is now acted out within these specific confines. As such, the act of interrogation takes on a more focused trajectory that only further complicates that essay which, in truth, has not yet even begun. How do the objects and expressions of the photographers’ subjects convey the court identity as one that is different from and perhaps in response to the identity expected in the other spaces one might inhabit (work, home, etc)? How does the explicative capacity afforded Wideman in the written form clarify the expressions of the photographed subjects? How does the center-seeking tendency of the photograph idealize the court identity? In the simple terms that the book lays out, how do media, method and message converge at this moment to enable a unique interpretation of the texts (here, photo and memoir) the reader has just encountered? We are thus forced, in the closing moments of the text, to attend to and account for those voices that Wideman’s memoir form, by nature of its genre, might silence.
There is, I think, a critical conclusion with regards to the pedagogy of Convergences that can be arrived at through acting out the interrogative processes of the text. And it would be remiss not to, at this moment, turn back to Harris and include in the discussion Diane Davis’ essay “Finitude’s Clamor.” In looking at the intersections above, it’s important to note that any one of them could serve as an epiphanic moment in the mold of Harris. At any of these points of intersection, the student writer could retreat from the text, armed with questions and contradictions from which a sound essay could be formed. But in its persistent questioning—and I think this is a method that Harris would endorse—the book casts such an essay not as wrong or unimportant but as a moment for even further thought. What emerges, then, is a pedagogy of interpretive revision, wherein the question is the mechanism that introduces new information into the interpretive frame and, as such, demands that the original idea/meaning be re-worked so to acknowledge what changes in thinking the question induced. It is the suspended-thesis model of Davis applied to the textual analysis that Harris prizes. And perhaps most importantly (and this applies directly to Davis and a certain anxiety with regard to the interpretive text), it does not treat the product as an endgame. The essay is itself subject to interrogation, a single moment of convergence that, when juxtaposed with other texts or further questioned in isolation, will inevitably yield new intersections and meanings.
There are countless other ideas that could be pursued with regard to Wideman’s piece. For instance, the book treats it, in its assignments, not as an occasion for an essay but rather an autobiography, either written or filmic. Or one could consider how the silenced voices that factor into our reading of Wideman are those same voices that, when considered in relation to Susan Sontag’s essay in Chapter 4, allow us to simultaneously question the use of war photography as evidence of a full account of history and employ it as an ethical imperative to the viewer. In conclusion, however, I’d like to turn to the book’s introduction as, in essence, a metaphor for the rigorous critical work that it asks of the reader. In framing its purposes around three primary questions—What is it saying? How it goes about saying it? Why it is delivered to you in a particular way (and I would add the affiliate question, what other ways could it be delivered)?—the book slyly reduces its aims. Even considered in a simultaneous manner, one could answer these questions in a relatively straightforward manner (without too much wrangling). But, almost immediately, the book begins questioning its own terms, not doubting, but interrogating for nuance. It asks what “internal contradictions” a text’s messages might contain. At the moment of arriving at meaning, it begins to question the meaning at which it arrived. And it is this emphasis on the interrogative process, this privileging it over any given outcome, that is at the heart of the pedagogy outlined here.